GOD AS MORAL BULLY AND AS THE WEAPON OF MORAL BULLIES

Christianity says that God by definition is truth. It also says it is ultimately futile and harmful to fight truth for it is not about you and you cannot change it. It warns that facts do not care what you think so you have to face them.

Unpack this.  We all know that it is a mistake to think you can get the better of truth.  There will be actual negative consequences.  And the potential risks are waiting.  And if you defy truth, that will affect others. You may not even notice most of it.   But now the faithful are trying to say that their version of God is the truth.  Make no mistake. Action is called for against the person who harms by not admitting the truth.  Now we are told that we must include god truths, religious truths, in our battle for truth.  Yet surely there is enough without religion coming into it?  And how do we know the god truths are truths?  For the Muslim you cannot defy the truth that Jesus is not Allah.  For Christians you cannot defy the truth that Jesus is Allah.  So it is a mess.

You can imagine it being said, "God would tell you it is not his fault that he is the truth and that the truth bites back."  Answer that there is something wrong if you can know iron gets red with heat and you cannot know this god truth as firmly.  Too many invent their own truth and pretend they are sure it really is objective truth.

And try this experiment. The hypothetical shows us where our real priorities lie.

Truth threatens force and is force for it will always be bigger than you or me.  Ask if God wants it to be that way or if he does not.  If he is into people freely coming to him he will not want truth to be so forceful.  Its compelling side is a necessary unavoidable evil.

If it has to be one or the other then what?  What if one had to be chosen?  If God comes first then he should stop being the truth.  If truth comes first then that matters not God.  God is not really God if he is not the only thing that ultimately matters.  This experiment shows how incoherent religion with its musings actually is.

Anyway, they turn truth into their God.  As truth forces and threatens further forcing, that explains the heavy-handed dogmatic God they have. Even if God were not the problem they would be. They would serve him not for he is the truth but because they like the force bit.

Jesus was vile for saying things like, “I am the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to God as Father except through me. He said that he alone was the gate and anybody getting in another way was doing so by means of a liar and thief.” This was an attack on anybody like Buddha who would have disagreed with him.  It is also a denial that something tested and which passes as true in the lab matters less than him.  His word overrides science.

If you argue that morality is not really true then you are saying it is a lie and wrong to say that so you are saying there is a morality after all. Morality always comes out and if suppressed it will come out in a warped way.  We are forced to respect morality which is not respect at all for respect cannot be forced. It is respect as in a lie.

Religion says that if there is no God then you have no reason to consider morality as in justice and love to be binding. In other words morality is not real and you can make it what you want to be.

After what we have seen morality is a like a battering ram and is not a thing to be celebrated even if we do need it.

If you need God to have a real or objective morality, and objective morality is a necessary evil, then that is reinforcing a necessary evil in an unnecessary way. It is using God to ground the morality and claiming he implements it so for his sake we should be objectively good and moral. If something is a necessary evil it should not get any glorification by being attributed to a good God. It is bad enough and there is a coarseness and intolerance in wanting to confer sacredness and beauty on it.

If you have to tolerate objective morality and regret its element of force then you are not doing that by turning it into God or God's law.

Believers however are clear that feeding a starving baby is not an objective moral principle if there is no God. But if there is no God then their argument would mean that the only thing that is objectively moral is to deny that objective morality exists.

So it is not true that you need a God to ground any kind of objective morality even if it is a misguided one!

The God grounding is an extreme and deranged doctrine and we should not be rejoicing in their God or religion. It shows that they are willing to use the baby's suffering to get you to believe. They cannot praise you for helping the baby for that is the sin of blessing good that leaves God out. But so hypocritical they are that they probably will.

Does God command what is right because it is right? Then God is not God or boss for he has to obey moral law but he doesn’t make it. He only conforms to it. In that case, belief in God or non-belief has nothing to do with morality. You can be moral without God. You would even have the right to disagree with God on right and wrong for it is independent of him.

The notion that righteousness is God's character and he didn't invent it and there is no higher law is just a dodge. It does not deal with the question.

These Christians deny that God's laws are arbitrary. But it is possible that owing to circumstances that God might have to make laws for the sake of making them. If there is no one way to protect kindness or justice then why not? It is better than no law at all. Moral values being grounded in God does not necessarily imply that his rules are non-arbitrary.

Christians do not like the view that morality is independent of God. If morality is independent of God, there could be circumstances in which God does not want us to believe he exists. It might be bad for us. Truth sometimes is bad for us. Perhaps God makes rules precisely so that in the bigger picture we may break them and that is a good thing. To stress the belief in God and that objective morality is grounded in him and to harass atheists for not believing is just bigotry.

Many say that once you take God out of the equation, morality becomes a subjective matter, it is a matter of us making up the rules as we go along. This is totally wrong. Saying you have to make up the rules is a rule itself. It's a moral rule even if it is a bad one. We HAVE to believe in morality as a non-subjective reality OR ELSE! Morality in religion is linked to free will and God supposedly wants us to be freely moral. How religion can tell you to believe morality is non-subjective or else and say it respects our free will is mind-boggling. Better a subjective morality than one you are forced or blackmailed to follow. If God gives you free will and then blackmails you to believe in morality as a reality what right has he to let you do evil and blame you? What right has he to say, "I am pure love and have to let people do wrong for I cannot force them to love me!" That is a lie and an excuse and insult to those who suffer and die. Both religion and the concept of God are based on an implicit threat - people don't mind for they imagine that is good for keeping people in line. But that does not make it right. A morality that is based on force not love is not a morality though it may be a convincing copy.

The "Only God grounds objective morality" argument accuses sceptics of being hypocrites and moral relativists. That accuses them of being part of the machine that declares the holocaust right because it was Nazi culture. If that is behind the argument, then the argument fails to create morality for it is a case of, “We have to accept it for the alternative, relativism is terrible.” There is no freedom or morality when there is that pressure. It might be subliminal or implicit but it is there. It is going to influence voters and politicians to try and force.

If you say there is no objective moral principle except that there are no other moral principles that is strange.  But it is not necessarily incoherent.  What if it is all you can get?  If God grounds morality you may have to live with it.  It does not give you the right to work out what society wants morality to be and put the cart before the horse and say it comes from God. 

This needs shouting.  IF YOU WANT TO PREACH GOD IN ORDER TO GROUND OBJECTIVE MORALITY YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME!  IF YOU WANT GOD IN ORDER TO VALIDATE THE MORALITY YOU WANT TO BELIEVE IN YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME.  AND WHAT ABOUT EVERYBODY ELSE'S TIME?

We conclude that it is objectively immoral to bring God into the equation if there is an objective morality. God only undermines it. And he does it for several reasons. We have seen those.

It is obvious that a person decides to help others then the person should be free from pressure. It is objectively true. That is important. Its being objectively moral is not as important.

Morality is a sum-up of rights-justice, love and responsibility. These ingredients are not equal. Responsibility comes first not love or justice. Love and justice cannot be thought about unless we have personal responsibility for they only apply to responsible beings. Morality contradicts itself for responsibility cannot come first for it forces itself on people!

We conclude that there are a lot of lies told about objective morality. God makes the whole thing worse and if you use God so that you can endorse morality you are implicitly admitting that what matters is it not him!

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